


Casual Friday

by greenjudy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Early Days, High-key pining, Just Roll With It, M/M, Reno has a potty mouth, cissnei's still there, fashion choices, jazz-hands chronology, low-key pining, not really about fetishism, unspoken thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: At this, Reno makes up his mind.“I can’t explain. Not in words. Just—I want you to smell this,” he says suddenly, shrugging off his jacket.There’s a long pause.“Did you just ask me to smell your jacket?” Tseng asks.





	Casual Friday

“Look. The man does not,” Rude is saying, as Reno approaches the half-assed break area Turks call the Breakfast Nook from an oblique angle, “fetishize Reno.”

Reno stops in his tracks. No one’s noticed him. He turns sideways and slips behind the fake foliage that half-obscures the Nook from the rest of the hallway. 

His colleagues, dressed for Casual Friday, are clustered around the coffee-maker. Rude’s in one of his vintage shirts from Costa del Sol; Cissnei, freshly returned from an unspecified mission in the Altai Straits, is wearing jeans and a pale shift covered in fluffy stylized clouds. Rude looks offended; Cissnei just looks amused.

“He absolutely fetishizes Reno,” she says, drawing out the words and looking pointedly at Rude. 

“Please be serious,” Rude says. 

“It’s the hair, right?” Itsy says, deadpan. “It’s always a hair thing.”

Itsy, in cateye glasses with a ballpoint pen stuck into her updo, is up on their floor to collect expense reports for Project K. They’re overdue by two weeks, but she doesn’t appear to be in a hurry, and instead lounges against the Nook’s long counter, kluged into the corner where the hallway bulges. 

Reno, still out of eyeshot, leans against the acrylic tree in its heavy pot, listening. 

Cissnei regards Rude, her eyes half-lidded, smile hidden behind her cup of coffee. 

“I think I know him pretty well at this point,” she says. At this, Itsy lifts an eyebrow.

“Know well, like, thread count well?” she asks.

“He’s not my cup of tea,” Cissnei replies. 

“Is he anyone’s cup of tea?” Itsy wonders, scratching at a freckle. “I mean.”

“This is a crazy conversation,” Rude says, “to be having in the Breakfast Nook.”

“Sure he is,” Cissnei says.

“Nah, he’s scary,” Itsy objects. “Not in the good way.” 

“There’s a good way?” Rude asks. “Itsy, what the fuck?”

“Don’t worry about Tseng,” Cissnei says. “Not like that, anyway. He’s not into workplace shenanigans.”

“You just accused him,” Rude points out, “of fetishizing Reno. What does that even mean, man?”

“Watch, sometime,” Cissnei says. “Watch his eyes when Reno’s around. Tseng’s wound up too tight. Reno’s got something he wants.” She smiles down into her coffee. “Use your eyes,” she says. 

Rude pushes his hands into his pockets. His face, behind wraparound sunglasses, is unreadable. 

“Everyone has a personal life,” he says. “Everyone deserves privacy, man.”

“All I’m saying, friendo, is hips don’t lie. Do they?”

Reno realizes he’s hugging himself through his leather jacket. He feels like a watch-spring.

“Fetishize,” he says to himself, very quietly.

“Cissnei, Reno doesn’t have any hips. Don’t fool yourself. It’s the hair,” Itsy says.

—

An hour later Reno’s hovering outside Tseng’s door. The hallway’s empty. He scuffs at the carpet with his shoe. 

“Fuck it,” he mutters, and knocks.

“That you, Reno?”

“Hidden camera?” Reno asks, closing the door behind him. 

“Distinctive knock,” Tseng says without lifting his eyes from the report spread across his desk blotter. “How may I help you this afternoon?”

Reno stretches, shivers, scrubs at the back of his neck. Tseng, neutral, silent, feels the air move as he paces.

“Listen, tell me something,” Reno says abruptly. “I want to know about a word.” 

Tseng makes a face. 

“Reno, we’ve been through this,” he says. Reno shakes his head; he won’t be quelled today.

“Fetishize,” he says, taking in Tseng’s rolled-up sleeves, his shoulders as they move under his shirt. He notices two new silver strands in Tseng’s black hair. “You know what it’s supposed to mean. What is a fetish, what is fetishizing. Officially. Really.”

Tseng pauses, puts down his pen, and pushes back from his desk to look at Reno.

“Reno, when I first met you, you were wearing a dog collar and living upstairs from an extraordinarily inventive nightclub. You don’t need a definition of ‘fetishize.’ So what’s this about?”

“Someone talking bullshit,” Reno mumbles. 

“I—what?” 

At this, Reno makes up his mind. 

“I can’t explain. Not in words. Just—I want you to smell this,” he says suddenly, shrugging off his jacket. 

There’s a long pause.

“Did you just ask me to smell your jacket?” Tseng asks.

“Fine, right, I’m a weirdo,” Reno says, vibrating. “Just—”

Reno holds his jacket out to his supervisor. Tseng studies him silently.

“Give it here, then,” he says. Taking the jacket by the collar, he turns it over in his hands, assessing its heft. Then he brings it up to his face, and inhales. 

He sits unmoving for a moment, the jacket in his arms. 

Reno looks at Tseng with hooded eyes. 

“You get it?” he asks. “There are like ten thousand things going on with the smell of this jacket, right?” 

Tseng doesn’t speak. Reno, who’s been drifting closer all this time, parks his butt on the edge of Tseng’s desk, and looks down at the jacket in Tseng’s lap.

“Me, I smell… engine oil,” Reno says. “Smoke. Asphalt from last week.”

“You took that turn much too fast,” Tseng says in a muted voice.

“The bike deserved better,” Reno agrees. “And then there’s this kind of sweet, complicated smell? That crazy hand lotion the girls in Accounting got me for my birthday…”

“Tangerine peel, vanilla, and sandalwood,” Tseng says. It’s an odor with which he is very familiar. 

“I’ll take your word for it,” Reno says. “It’s a little sweet, but I’ve gotten used to it now. I like it. And then under that, there’s whatever leather smells like. Whatever you tan the hides with. But it… I mean, I smell this, and I remember the day I picked it up. That tailor, Mister Empalo, such a bad-ass…you remember, this was before he moved to Kalm, when he was still in Sector One. He was a nice old guy. It was my entire paycheck, he cut it to fit me, long arms and everything. Rude told me I was crazy…I wore it out of the shop. I remember what the sky looked like that day, the light… then you called in.”

“Spoiling your fun,” Tseng says. 

“Me and Rude tailed that guy all day and all night, Jacky something…”

“Jacky Horstman,” Tseng supplies. “Narcotics specialist. Cagey. You hung onto him, though.”

“All day and all night.” Reno shakes his head. “A hell of a ride. We finally pinned him down in the financial district. I smell this jacket, I feel like I’m smelling that day, standing in the Canyons and looking up through the train tracks and trolley-car wires, looking up through the buildings at all these little pieces of sunset sky…”

“You’d been awake for forty hours at that point,” Tseng says softly. “I tried to make you and Rude clock out after that, but you wouldn’t go.” 

Reno grins. 

“So you gave up and took us all out to celebrate.”

“You filed your paperwork,” Tseng says mildly. “I thought the occasion deserved to be commemorated. I still can’t believe you picked the Parade Rest, though. The most calcified, old-fogey…”

“Always wondered what it was like inside,” Reno says. “I liked the bar. Old-school. Shiny.”

“Rude drank mai-tais that night. And you tried every upscale brand of whiskey they had,” Tseng says. “You kept your hands jammed in your pockets the entire time.”

Reno’s listening, his eyes half-closed. He smiles at the memory. 

“Yeah, I had to fight really hard not to steal that one guy’s Radiomir right off his wrist,” he says. “My hands were in my pockets like that so I wouldn’t, you know, put them in _his_ pockets. Not with you around. Didn’t want to shame you. Tarnish the brand.” 

Tseng looks at Reno, head to one side. 

“That’s what it was about? You had the perfect conditions for a lift. The light from the bar was behind you. He couldn’t have made out your features.”

“If he twigged, though, he would have pegged me by my jacket. Kind of an easy ID, yeah?”

“True. Oxblood,” Tseng murmurs, almost to himself. “Unforgettable color.” 

“That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m talking about,” Reno says. “You can’t even… we don’t even know how to explain. We just sum it up by saying, ‘Hey, I like this jacket.’”

“I like this jacket,” Tseng says. “Always have.”

“No lie?”

“No lie, Reno,” Tseng says quietly. 

“Is that a fetish?” 

Tseng doesn’t reply. Reno regards him, his face serious. 

“Do you—is this—do we call this a fetish?” 

“I—no.”

“I know, right? You don’t. Of course you don’t. You don’t want to fuck the jacket. It’s not about the jacket.”

“What,” Tseng asks, choosing words slowly and with great care, “is not about the jacket, Reno?” 

Reno’s ringtone—a sample of “Kiss Me, Kill Me” by the Destroyers—cuts into the silence.

“Yeah?—What? Fuck. Just—no, fuck, wait. Five minutes. _Three_ minutes. Don’t leave without me.” Reno leans right into Tseng’s personal space, his bare shoulder brushing against Tseng’s lips, and fishes his mag-rod out of his jacket pocket. “Rude, do not. Leave. Without me. Frankie Manuflect owes me seventy-three gil—“ 

He jams the mag-rod into the back pocket of his jeans. “Wait,” he says into the phone, then, and turns back to Tseng. 

“I’ll be back for that,” he says, jerking his head at the jacket.

“Reno,” Tseng says. 

“It was just for the air conditioner—it’s fucking freezing inside. Too hot for the jacket under the Plate today,” Reno, halfway through the door, says in a muffled voice. “Sorry. Hang onto that. It means a lot to me, yeah? Treat it nice. Gotta run. Promise I’ll come back.”

The door shuts with a click, and silence descends on Tseng’s office. 

He checks his phone, and logs onto Shinra’s awful intranet. He feels Reno’s jacket across his legs. He could put it on the coat rack. He will, in a minute or two. 

He sits upright and still in his chair, his hands resting on Reno’s red jacket, and closes his eyes.


End file.
